Guests Top Rants & Raves; Many Are One in the Same

Service, Cleanliness, Food, Room Size, Price, Bed & Bathroom Are Mirror Image of Travelers’ Most Mentioned Hotel Compliments & Complaints. Over One Million Online Sentiments Show Guests Top Rants & Raves…

Sing your praises or seething mad are typically polar opposites.  Yet when it comes to hotel feedback there is a common thread between the two.  TrustYou, a travel data company that is an aggregator and analyzer of online reviews, scoured over a million sentiments from online reviews and discovered, once again, that travelers’ top compliments and complaints are often mirror images of one another.  TrustYou’s second annual Rants & Raves report covered hundreds of thousands of reviews with over one million sentiments spanning a 12-month period to find out what guests were saying most often about their hotel experiences.  Service, food, room size, price, bed, bathroom and cleanliness (or lack thereof), took the place in the top 10 spots on both the positive and negative lists.*     
 
The good news for hotels is that the number of positive comments outnumbers the negative by a considerable margin. Mentions of friendly/professional/efficient service, for example, have nearly 11 times the number of comments than bad service (last year the good outweighed the bad by nearly nine times the volume).  Clean rooms outweighed dirty rooms by more than four times the feedback, and good food trumped bad food by more than seven times the feedback.  While there seems to be lots of talk surrounding hotel Internet (free vs. charging for it, good connections vs. poor), that did not make the top 10 rant or rave (it came in at number 15 for bad connection and number 18 for pricing as a rant with just over 3,000 total mentions, minimal compared to other categories such as good service with 100,000+ mentions).  The top four compliments remained in the same positions year over year: service, location, room and food/restaurant.     
 
Here’s a look at the top TrustYou Rants & Raves, representing a global picture from over 250 sites around the world across 23 languages (for the expanded list and comparison to last year’s findings visit TrustYou's blog):

“The commonalities between the Rants & Raves show what guests are most focused on when staying in a hotel,’” said Benjamin Jost, CEO and co-founder of TrustYou. “The comments provide tremendous value for both consumers and hoteliers,” he added.  “Travelers are able to get a first-hand take on hotel experience from someone who actually experienced the property.  And hoteliers can take advantage of people publicizing their positive experiences, while address the negative thoughts or misperceptions in a public forum.  This has brought an entire new level of transparency and accountability to the industry.”  The volume of online comments related to the hospitality industry is tremendous; TrustYou searches 700 reviews every single minute.

About TrustYou

Since 2008, TrustYou has set the standard for reputation management with solutions for hospitality-industry businesses to analyze online reviews, tweets and posts across the social web, to gather trusted reviews directly from its customers, and to use the authentic conversations to successfully market online reputations.
 
TrustYou’s monitoring dashboards capture sentiment and opinions from millions of comments in one easy-to-view place from sources like TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Yelp and more across 23 different languages. In addition, TrustYou provides free online customer satisfaction surveys and marketing tools for all hotels.  TrustYou’s international team hails from 23 countries and speaks more than 20 different languages. The company already has more than 12,000 customers in 60 countries and monitors over 400,000 hotels, provide an extensive base for competitive analysis.  TrustYou’s clients include individual hotels, independent boutique chains, destinations and major global brands such as Accor, Marriott, Starwood, Hard Rock Cafes and Best Western Hotels. The company’s partnerships span an impressive variety of organizations; from tech companies like Google, Trust and Micros, to destination-specific alignment with Germany and Switzerland to improve the countries’ official star-rating systems for hotels. TrustYou’s headquarters are in Dallas, USA and Munich, Germany, with further representatives in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Central Europe, Asia and Australia. To learn more about TrustYou visit www.trustyou.com.

*Based on one million randomly selected comments in reviews written within the 12 months. 
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